A fascinating piece in the London Times

I sacrificed what should have been the best years of my life for the black lie of free love. All the sex I ever had — and I had more than my fair share — far from bringing me the lasting relationship I sought, only made marriage a more distant prospect.

And I am not alone. Count me among the dissatisfied daughters of the sexual revolution, a new counterculture of women who are realising that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead.

Dawn Eden goes into much more detail--a 37 year old woman who bought into the feminist myth comes around to realize that the stuffy old Christians were right--chastity isn't just moral, its the "right" way to live.

Its a surprisingly difficult subject to broach--most people either accept or reject the proposition instinctively and outright. The sexual moderns call a concept like chastity old-fashioned, which is supposed to be dismissive, but ends up telling us something important about traditional social mores--they persist, they last, they work. They are a self-evident truth about human nature.

I look back on my education sometimes, and marvel at how much it was absolute crap or quickly became irrelevant within a few years. What stayed useful year after year and decade after decade where whatever I had discovered about myself and others. Everything changes, but people don't change. Human nature is eternal.

It is for that reason that I find myself concerned about allegedly "new" ways of living, which of course aren't really new at all, but simply old failures dusted off, rediscovered and repackaged as brilliant, new ways of constructing our relationships. Free love? Old as dirt and never particular successful, in fact free love usually heralded some massive social disaster such as the plague. While there has always been homosexuality, where is the persistent social role for homosexual couples in world history? Even in those societies were homosexuality had an accepted and ritualized place, there was never any question of equality with the heterosexual institutions.

Over the millenia, everything has been tried, but we always come back to what works--men and women pair-bonding, raising children and forming the bedrock of societies all over the world.

I suppose its at least possible that our technology and modernity has made room for some new social constructs, but I doubt it. It strike me that in spite of all the wonderful things our knowledge and technology allows us to do, we always end up doing the exact same things, because after all, we are and always will be, only human.